Besides HTC, Motorola has also entered the Android market with
Cliq. It even have a Android development platform. At
http://developer.motorola.com/platforms/android/, you will can find information on
App Accelerator Program (for Android apps distribution), and
MOTODEV Studio, a set of Android development tools.
In this blog entry, I will go through the installation process with screenshots. I have installed MOTODEV Studio Beta on my
LinuxMint (Gloria),
Gnome 2.26.1 Desktop. Here goes...
1. Welcome screen.
2. Of course you will
*read* every single line, don't you?
3. The installer tries to detect the Java environment.
NOTE: The Android Development Tool (ADT) depends on Sun Java to work, therefore Sun Java must be installed first.
4. Choose a location for installation. I chose my home directory.
5. It will create the directory if it does not exist yet.
6. The installation went through smoothly. Now, launch it.
7. Eclipse will always ask for a workspace location (on first launch). You can check the checkbox at the bottom to prevent Eclipse from nagging in future.
8. The Eclipse package does not come with Android SDK, which contains the emulator, debugger, ... Follow the instruction on
http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r3/index.html to download and install the Android SDK.
9. Since I have already installed the SDK, I will just configure the path in Eclipse.
10. Done!
11.
I have already setup an Android Virtual device. These 2 screenshots show 2 slightly different views of the same emulator. The 1
st screenshot shows an emulator with device body, while the 2
nd screenshot shows the emulator without a device body. There is a "Snippet" tool at the bottom-left of the screen. It contains some frequently used codes for you to add in your program. The "Device Management" tool at the bottom-center of the screen allows you to manage multiple Android (real/virtual) devices. These are some of the features that is exclusive to MOTODEV Studio.
12. Publishing to Motorola's market and Google's Android market made easy. This is one of the reason why I preferred to develope Android app over iPhone app. For iPhone apps, developers are tied to 1 distribution channel (App Store). Android live in a free (as in speech) world, anyone can setup an app market. And because the
Open Handset Alliance has made Android open source, I think there will be many interesting app/hacks coming out in future.
That's it! Now it is time for me write some apps in my new shiny IDE ;)
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